We've gathered together a group of authors who will be writing about the future of work from a variety of perspectives, including HR, technology, facilities/real estate, marketing and more. Guest authors will also be joining us from time to time to give us the benefit of their knowledge and ideas.

As I wrote in my inaugural post, I believe that communications is at the heart of the future of work. I hope you'll stop by, subscribe, and add your comments and questions.

June 15, 2005

John Hagel reports on two Institute for the Future reports on cooperation and competition. I've been looking forward to the release of these, and have downloaded them for reading.

He writes:

The first report, Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
(link for pdf file download), by Howard Rheingold, Andrea Saveri, Alex
Soojung-Kim Pang and Kathi Vian, observes that "cooperation is one
partner in a pair of strategic choices; its constant companion is
competition."

The second report, Technologies of Cooperation
(link for pdf file download), by the same authors minus Alex
Soojung-Kim Pang, is more satisfying, perhaps because it stays closer
to the technologies that are reshaping the business landscape.

His conclusion?

These two reports do a great job of surveying the landscape and even creating
some interesting maps to orient us. What we need now is a more prescriptive view
of the paths that are most promising through this landscape - constrained by the
awareness that the landscape continues to evolve and that individual context
does matter.

June 08, 2005

Toni Kistner, former Network World managing editor and Telework Beat columnist, has left the publication to join Capital Gaines Investments, a firm that focuses on the distributed work space. She has started a new, weekly enewsletter about distributed work called, "Fanning Out: News and Analysis
from the World of Distributed Work." She writes that it takes up where Telework Beat leaves off. An example:

The old frumpy telework industry (with its emphasis on pilot programs, government subsidies, business
incentives, work/life balance, traffic congestion and the like) is being supplanted by something much grander in scope: distributed work. Distributed work encompasses telework, telecommuting, remote work, mobile work, whatever work-it's a whole new way of doing business.

Toni is a great commentator, and I highly recommend you sign up for the enewsletter here.

1. Distributed work may be surprisingly attractive to older workers - and to their employers.2. One of the biggest changes in the future of work will be the degree and kind of control that individual workers have over where, when, and what they do to produce value.3. Economic development agencies, and local community initiatives, will be a major factor in creating the future of work.4. Corporate office facilities will undergo radical redesign as architects and facilities managers redefine their roles as enablers of work, not as creators and managers of physical places.5. There is strength in numbers. Change agents are far more effective when they operate as part of a larger community than as "lone wolves."

May 04, 2005

Each of us has multiple skills, yet oftentimes we're pigeonholed ("he's
an accounting guy," "she's a tech person"). But those things often just
reflect the job we were hired to do. When do we get to showcase our
Renaissance skills? How can companies best find those out?

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart in another guise: that of the generalist - specialist divide. I am a generalist and proud of it. Rather than choosing a specialty (which, honestly, isn't really required in the field of mass communications), I chose a frame: communications. Everything I do, read, think about is informed by the question, "how can I use this to improve the practice of communications (broadly defined)." This approach requires me to break down boundaries between disciplines, cherry picking those ideas and tools I discover and applying them to different areas than they were perhaps initially intended for.

These days, I am increasingly tying another frame to my ongoing inquiry: future of work. To me, communications is key to new work models that focus on a collaborative vs. a command/control approach.

So, maybe it would be fruitful for companies to rethink how they define jobs or assign job titles. Perhaps, rather than saying "you work in technical support" or "you are a marketing person" they should uncover the frame through which their employee or potential employee views the world and place him or her in the loosely-defined work boundary that best fits them. Of course, that requires rethinking how we partition out work.